300 & Language

I haven't seen 300 yet. Is it still out? I really wanted to see it in the theater, but Manda isn't interested in the slightest and I rarely go out to the movies without her. I'll just have to wait for DVD, I guess. At least that will give me time to read the account in Herodotus first.

Lately I've been really interested in the 'problem of language' (see my last post on my blog). It probably comes from reading Derrida, though he says 'the question of the sign' and is more interested in literary criticism specifically. He talks about structuralism which I think is a better and more specific way of terming the most recent and, presumably, the final mode of what you and I would call modernism. Without really giving it a specific definition he talks about structuralism as system of totalitarianism. I haven't reached the point yet, but I think he is speaking both of totalitarian in that it assumes that the structure of language (and, so, truth) is viewable in its totality and totalitarian in the political sense - a structuralist view affirms its own structure of language (and, so, truth) to the exclusion of other structures (or non-structures(!)), doing violence to them.

I have really been thinking a lot about this lately: that it is impossible to make a statement at all without doing violence to all other statements. Not only violence to everyone else's statement, but even to one's own other statements - putting voice to an idea is, inherently, a violent act because one is forced to narrow what may be broad in one's mind into a single statement. And so our 'expression' is a remarkably good word - 'to squeeze out'.

A little heavier reading and thinking.